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Spy's killing sparks race
14/01/2007 21:41 - (SA)
London - Columbia Pictures and director Michael Mann are racing against Warner Brothers and actor Johnny Depp to make a film about a former Russian spy who was poisoned in London with a rare radioactive isotope, reports Variety trade paper.
Columbia Pictures agreed to pay $1.5m (nearly R11m) for the film rights to a book about the spy, Alexander Litvinenko.
It is being co-written by the former spy's widow, Marina Litvinenko, and Alex Goldfarb, a close friend, according to Los Angeles-based Variety's website.
The book is expected to be published in May by Simon & Schuster's Free Press imprint, said the report.
Warner Brothers has bought the rights to a different book about the ex-spy for Johnny Depp's production company, Infinitum Nihil, the paper reported earlier on Friday.
Warner Brothers were outbid
Depp will produce the film and could star in it, the paper said.
Warner Brothers had tried to buy the rights to the book by Litvinenko's widow, but was outbid, the report said.
The studio has acquired the rights to a book by New York Times journalist Alan Cowell, which is expected to be published next year by Doubleday, said the report.
Studio officials were not immediately available for comment.
Mann is known for his often-violent crime sagas such as Collateral, Heat and Miami Vice, while Depp often takes on eccentric character roles in films such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Finding Neverland and Edward Scissorhands.
The report said Columbia envisioned an espionage thriller "exploring the collision between the deep-rooted Russian power structure enforced by the KGB... and the new wave of wild-west capitalism" that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Variety.
Litvinenko died in November, several weeks after falling ill with what was later determined to be poisoning by the rare radioactive isotope polonium-210.
Litvinenko was a one-time agent in the Russian federal security service, or FSB - an agency that replaced the KGB - who broke with the agency and went to Britain, where he was granted asylum.
In exile, he became a fierce Kremlin critic and wrote a book claiming that the FSB had bombed Russian blocks of flats in 1999 to blame on Chechen separatists and create a pretext for resuming the war in Chechnya.
Litvinenko said he fell ill after meeting an Italian security expert in London to discuss possible suspects in the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a month earlier.
Blamed the Kremlin
Politkovskaya was noted for her coverage of Chechnya, in which she was highly critical of alleged human-rights violations by Russian forces and by Kremlin-backed Chechen officials.
In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed the Kremlin for his poisoning.
Russian officials have denied that allegation. British and Russian authorities continue to investigate Litvinenko's death.
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